Hi, I'm new here. I've been studying Japanese for roughly 2-3 years and this site looks like it can really help me in my endeavors. I would say I have a pretty strong vocabulary for the most part, although there are definitely plenty of words I have yet to learn and I can read about 900-1000 kanji or so with some difficulty. My understanding of Japanese grammar is decent and I'm in the midst of tackling now a lot of the somewhat more advanced grammar. I finished learning all the grammar in the Genki Textbook series about a year and a half ago, learned everything that appears in Tae Kims Grammar guide (although I didn't just use his guide to learn the grammar as his site is merely a summary) and since then I have been learning grammar as I've come across it.

So, with that introduction, I was wondering if anyone here knows of anything worthwile for me to read in Japanese. I'm not looking for language-learning material, just some regular Japanese writing or maybe even a Japanese book. Newspapers and a lot of journalism/online articles are still too hard (as my kanji knowledge is only really half that I need to be able to read a newspaper comfortably) and I know most novels can be even harder than Newspapers to read (shudders). So, is there anything at my described level out there that I could look into and possibly buy off the internet or at a bookstore? I had a thought that maybe I'd be able to read a Harry Potter book translated into Japanese. I don't know how difficult that would be though. The HP books in English (especially the earlier ones in the series, not so much the later ones) are aimed directly at children, so maybe its the same in Japanese? It's just one possibility that's going on in my mind, but any ideas are welcome and appreciated greatly.

Manga. You sound like you're just a little more advanced than I am, and manga is the thing I can read for fun right now.

I have Harry Potter 1 sitting on my shelf and waiting... But it's still just a little too hard to read without a dictionary at my hand. But even with a dictionary, I swear the translation is lacking. Even the first sentence comes out way different in overall meaning. (The original says something about being 'normal people' where the Japanese translation is more like 'honest people'. And they're boasting it in the Japanese, where they are pleading in the English.)

I had a book of Winnie the Pooh that was pretty good. It did use kanji, but included furigana. I don't know if the story would be as exciting as Harry Potter though

I don't know what you can easily get from overseas, so I can't really give specific advice. In Japan you can just go to a bookstore and look in the kid's/young adults' section for lots of good reading material.

yukamina wrote:Hey, I have this book! I didn't finish reading it though, because it felt like it wasn't going anywhere. Some of it was fairly easy, other spots it was hard to figure out what was going on.

I didn't read the book, but we had to translate an excerpt for one of our exams. I don't know whether it was representative of the book, but I sure appreciated the choice

Something you might want to try to start with is the rather large series of Western classics translated and "rewritten" (i.e., the whole thing is a paraphrase) aimed at the junior market in Japan.

What that means is, simpler vocab, simpler grammar, and you already know the story, so reading them will give you an added boost of being able to figure out what is going on even if you don't grok every verb and adjective and noun.

Likewise, there are teen-aged versions of almost every Japanese classic book, as well as teen-aged histories, novels, and other things.

Wow, I didn't expect to get so many replies. Thank you everyone. All your posts have been very helpful. Xiaohua, I'll definitely look into those books you mentioned. And AJBryant, based on your advice it seems like my original idea of reading Harry Potter might actually prove fruitful.

Really? I read Azkaban in JP and English and found it a rather good translation -- especially considering some of the garbage that gets passed off as "translation" in most foreign books.

I read the first one in Japanese as well, and I thought the translation was quite good.

Also, Tony's suggestion of reading books you already know is a good one. I'm a big fan of Agatha Christie myself, so I read the Japanese translation of Murder on the Orient Express and it was definitely easy to follow.

How did the translator do the names? Was it a direct transliteration of the English, or did he/she try to evoke the same emotive content of the English (e.g., "Slytherin" => "slithering")?

I can only imagine rendering bastardized Latin into katakana would be headache-inducing -- even if we don't know Latin, most people can grok "occulo reparo" from occular (eyes) and "repair" -- we have the language roots. In katakana, it would have seemed gibberish, no?